What can I do now about a past settlement? 21 Answers as of November 08, 2011

It is impossible to determine if the settlement was proper without knowing details of the damages and the doctors conduct and liability issues. If you signed off on the settlement the case is over and you can not go back for more unless you can prove fraud.

You have not provided sufficient information for a good assessment of the value of your case. If you accepted a settlement, chances are you *forever* signed away your rights to sue the parties involved for the same event and occurrence.

I seriously doubt you have any recourse at this point because any statute of limitation would likely have run by now. If the children are minors, you may have a possible claim.

You can do nothing now. The whole purpose of a settlement is to settle the matter. If you could re-open it, it wouldn't be settled now, would it? That's why it's called a "settlement". You claim you are not for the money, but that's what it's all about. You claim that you felt it was unfair, but you signed for it. You ask if you should not have taken the settlement, but you state that it was advised by your lawyer. If it was advised by your lawyer, that's why you should take it, your lawyer's advice is one of the values you are paying for, since he/she is the one in the position to properly evaluate a case. It's been 6 years now, way past time to move on. Get some counseling.

Once a case is settled, you cannot reopen it to get more money even if you feel that the settlement was unfair. I would have to know a lot more about the case before I can say whether you should have settled for more. I will say this, in most cases, you settle for less than the full value of all of your damages, and even though it is for less than full value, it is in your best interest to do this. In some cases, the issue of whether the incident (such as a wreck) caused all of your injury is disputed. Rather than take a chance that you will get little or nothing, you compromise and get a larger settlement than the Defendant wants to pay, but less than your total damages. In a Med Mal case, liability is usually disputed. The Defendant likely had an expert prepared to testify that the misdiagnosis was not a result of negligence, but that, given the information the doctor had, any reasonable physician could have made the same misdiagnosis despite exercising all due care. In that case, you have a choice of rather to go to trial and get all of your damages, or compromise. You probably did the right thing.

You cannot undo the settlement you reached. Whether it was a mistake is impossible to say without a full review of the case. Hopefully, you had competent lawyers and the settlement was fair.

Statute of limitations is 3 years. You cant do anything, so forget it. No sense beating yourself to death over a bad judgment 6 years ago. And it may not have been a bad judgment. It was probably the best that could be had at the time. Settlements are usually compromises because both sides have a point of view. Folks normally don't roll over and send you truckloads of money. They fight. They contest. They contend. And your lawyer does the best he can with what he has got.

It appears that too much time has elapsed since the settlement was consummated and it may be too late to contest the settlement at this time.

I'm sorry to hear about the misfortune of your wife and your daughter. The law favors finality of judgments and settlements. It is very common for people to have regrets after something is finished, wishing that the result could have been better. The courts of law have been dealing with people who want "do-overs" as long as there have been courts. The signed agreements required to commemorate settlements are therefore almost always air-tight, water-tight, and any other kind of tight you can think of. The legal profession uses a Latin phrase for it: "res judicata", meaning "the thing is decided". I'm sorry to have to tell you that, too. Regarding whether or not you should have taken the settlement, you really don't provide much information to reflect on about that, but it seems as though it probably seemed like the thing to do at the time and should therefore be categorized as "water under the bridge" or "spilt milk". As long as I'm dispensing free opinions, let me quote the venerable Dan Quale as he said, "the future is ahead of us".

Too late to do anything now. As for whether you got good advice I would have no way of knowing the answer to that without knowing all the facts of the case.